God Created Us

Joyce: you can be determined that even if it’s just God on your side, you can still overcome and have victory, and become a better you as your book talks about.

Pastor Joel: Yeah, I think so, too.  Sometimes it’s funny — I don’t know that they always mean to, but sometimes your own family or the people closest to you just keep bringing up something or telling you what you can’t do. You would think that would be — again, maybe they don’t mean to — they’d be the people who would encourage you.  You think about David’s own family. He wouldn’t have become who he was meant to be if he would have let his brother condemn him and keep him feeling like a loser and all that, but he just rose up. Any of us can press forward. I remind myself all the time that nobody can keep me from fulfilling my destiny except myself. The devil can’t, other people can’t, critics can’t. If I’ll stay focused and trust God, all the forces of darkness can’t keep me from becoming who God created me to be.

Joyce: That’s absolutely right, but we can prevent progress through laziness, passivity, complacency, looking at our past failures all the time. But interestingly enough, another thing that I also think can hinder people from becoming all that God wants them to be is leaning too much on their past successes.

Pastor Joel: I think that’s exactly right because it keeps us from pressing forward sometimes. You say, “I’m good enough.” I like the phrase: don’t let good enough be good enough. I mean, “i’m a good enough minister, a good enough parent.” or the other one that I hear is, “i’m as good as my neighbors,” or “I went as far as my parents did.”